Smart kitty
My cat always yell at me when the washing machine or the dryer stops and looks so happy when I unload them.
Why would this make you fear your cat?
It alerts you to danger, potentially understands a few English words.
These are… good things, yes?
… Would you be afraid of a dog if you could get a dog to bark when a pot is about to boil over?
If the cat understands English, then it has heard too much. We cannot allow any loose ends. The soup is too important for us to be exposed now.
I’m genuienly convinced that cats can understand human language at least half as well as dogs, and they just actually do not fucking care about what we are saying, 95% of the time.
I think they are telepathic
I mean, both dogs and cats can smell significantly better than you can.
They can nearly literally smell your stress, fear, sadness… anything in a human that is regulated or expressed via horomones? They can smell that.
https://articles.hepper.com/can-dogs-smell-emotions/
Cats also can smell much better than a human can, I see no reason why a domesticated one would not also be able to do similar things as dogs.
https://vetexplainspets.com/cats-sense-of-smell-vs-dogs/
So they don’t need to have … Charles Xavier style telepathy.
They just need to use their relatively superpowered sense of smell, to have a pretty good read of the emotions you’re feeling.
And! Well… many cats technically do carry a kind of parasite, that does impact human minds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii
The primary mechanisms of T. gondii–induced behavioral changes in rodents occur through epigenetic remodeling in neurons that govern the relevant behaviors.[11][12]
…
Behavioral changes observed between infected and non-infected humans include a decreased aversion to cat urine (but with divergent trajectories by gender) and an increased risk of schizophrenia and suicidal ideation.[17][18] Preliminary evidence has suggested that T. gondii infection may induce some of the same alterations in the human brain as those observed in rodents.[19][20][9][23]
…
T. gondii is one of the most common parasites in developed countries;[25][26] serological studies estimate that up to 50% of the global population has been exposed to, and may be chronically infected with, T. gondii; although infection rates differ significantly from country to country.[14][27]
So, given that T. Gondii literally manipulates the genes in a human that govern your neurons… that arguably also constitutes an indirect form of mind control.
Last bit:
Dogs, as we domesticated them from wolves… literally grew muscles in their faces, around their eyesockets, that allow them to have and make human style eyebrow expressions.
Probably not ‘mind control’, but… sure helps with interspecies communication.
Yeah me too, except I think they understand it all. They just don’t fucking care and it makes me mad.
An animal understanding a request made in plain English is a vast departure from one’s assumptions about their language understanding, which can be quite creepy
Its creepy that your pet could understand a very simplified version of what you are saying?
How?
Why?
It’s creepy that your Alexa is always listening, and sending all that info to a giant megacorporation.
It’s creepy that people pay for that ‘privelege’.
It’s creepy that Grok can undress a woman.
What is creepy about the idea that a small animal you presumably love… can understand you a bit?
Its … not going to be able to tell anyone very much, in very specific detail.
You can’t have ‘ability to execute a command’ without ‘ability to comprehend a command’.
Dogs are commonly trained to execute a variety of complex commands in multiple specialities… the creepiness is just … the idea that cats can also do something similar?
I find that to be amazing and wonderful, I don’t find this creepy at all.
I genuinely do not understand the specific thing here that is creepy.
I woke up one night to my cat batting me in the face over and over again, something he never did. I was sleeping on the couch in the living room and when I put my feet down on the carpet they went squish. My cat liked to sleep in the bathroom sink, and on this night he managed to simultaneously push the drain closed and flip up the faucet lever. The sink had no overflow drain (I have no idea why not) so it just started flooding the whole house. I don’t know how long this went on, but most of the first floor carpet was soaked and a bunch of water had gone into the basement through the floorboards and vents.
I was really impressed that Mr. Needy knew something was wrong and that he needed to wake me the fuck up to deal with it.
lol he was just annoyed that now everywhere he stepped was water. It’s the cat version of the floor is lava.
Is your username a kids in the hall reference?
I’m squishing your head.
I’m pretty sure cats understand human language just fine. They’re mostly just jerks about it.
Our cats 100% understand, “Get down!” and they will 100% of the time try and ignore us until we’ve said it at least 5 times and started to get up to manually remove them. 100% jerks.
Animals aren’t stupid, they just don’t have everything humans do. They can understand intent sometimes. The real unusual thing is how the cat cared. Most would probably understand the assignment, but choose to see how far things would go.
Animals are definitely smarter than many people give them credit for. I’m reminded of how my old dog had to really pee one time when I was sleeping. She woke me up in the gentlest way, with licks to my arms. Considering that she could have barked or pawed at me instead (as she did to my dad sometimes when she needed to pee at night. He’s a very deep sleeper), she seemed to have thought through her options to choose a method that wouldn’t have startled me awake.
Smart little pup, I miss her.
If she needs to go out at night, my pup will come up to the top of the bed and patiently tap her paw on my pillow until I wake up. It always works, even when I really don’t want to be awake.
“I don’t know what’s happening but I don’t like it. Please fix it. You fix things.”
Being included was fun enough to care, I suspect.
I don’t know if it’s a fluke or what, but one time I decided to bake cookies so I started the oven and walked away in typical silly goose fashion. I got distracted upstairs and my cat barged in my office screaming and acting unusually agitated. So I followed her, she led me to the kitchen where the oven has been preheating for a good 45 minutes.
She got extra dreamies this day.
Maybe she could smell something strange.
Or felt the heat from the oven, especially if her routine brings her close to it. Or just got annoyed at the sound the solonoids make as it cycled on and off to hold the temperature.
But there’s a non-zero chance she knew that the human had started doing something with the box that makes things that go in it smell delicious and then got distracted and wanted to remind the human, either wanting to smell some delicious smells or even understanding that that box shouldn’t be on when it isn’t making delicious smells (from observing other interactions with or around the oven).
Solenoids move a rod in and out. You’re thinking of relays that connect a large current based on a signal from a small current.
Yeah and that rod can be used to make or break a circuit, and often is the mechanism used in a relay. The clicking noise is that rod slamming into the stops.
Damn, you guys have some smart cats. My cat is dumb as shit and would never do any of these things.
Dumb as shit kitties represent. One of our cats is the dumbest I’ve ever known. She constantly runs into things, hits her head, injures herself jumping from heights (no she doesn’t have any health problems, vet checked fine), she just dumb. But she’s also adorable and loving and we love her.
“Something smells fishy”
She got extra dreamies this day.
You gave your cat drugs?
Yes I do, but that’s catnip. Dreamies are just candy.
I am but a treat dispenser for Her Majesty.
Funnily enough she’s not even that into catnip so I don’t give her cat-appropriate drugs that often.
Catnip sensitivity is genetically linked. Very few cats in Australia have the gene for it (appx 30%), for example, because it didn’t grow wild there. No selective pressure for the gene.
Fun short list of things that can trigger the same reaction (and are perfectly safe) if they don’t respond to catnip:
- Dried carrot
- Valerian root (in pouch)
- Silvervine
- Chlorine on swimwear/towels (try wet or dry)
Also a laptop bag for our calico. No idea why she likes that laptop bag but she goes nuts over it, more even than catnip.
That is so interesting, thank you for taking the time to explain!
My cat detests chlorine, husband has to use a special shower gel after going to the swimming pool otherwise he gets attacked. She hisses and swats if she smells chlorine on his skin.
I’ll try the other 3 though.
I used to make valerian tea and my flatmate had a cat. He was crazy about it.
TIL there are straight edge cats
Boiling soup makes water splashing noises, cat doesn’t like the idea of water getting out of its cage
Water should not hiss at me, human must teach it manners
Afraid???
(If anything, give kitty a raise, add chief soup-boiling supervisor to their many titles.)😀 this is awesome. Animals know when things are out of the ordinary. On occasion my dog will stare back at our front door and refuse to leave for the walk. It usually means I forgot something inside.
Had a very intelligent German Shepard once complaining and freaking out because my circuit breaker panel had caught fire. Silly creature warning us we were all going to die.
We woke up to a burst pipe blasting hot water out in our flat once.
Only reason we woke up was thanks to our beautiful orange cat yelling at us practically in plain English
I’ve told people before that my old cat had actually vocalized something very close to ‘help!’ when his litter box was full, multiple times, and once when he got either one of his claws or duclaw stuck in some fabric covered furniture so well that he could not free himself from it.
I’d raised him nearly from birth, and talked to him like he was not an idiot.
But people tend to look at me like I’m an idiot when I tell them that.
Got the braincell at just the right time
I’m imagining a cockney cat going “Meoi mate, there’s a bursting pipe 'o wa’er in yer kitchen!”
Oi! My dinner getting wet!
Talk to animals like they’re not inferior dipshits and you find out how much you’ve been making them into them.
If you treat animals as though they have agency and intelligence, they really do learn a lot and have unique personalities.
100%. My old dog got to go on special night time walks with me, without a leash. It started with just hanging out on the front porch, where she proved she wouldn’t chase anything or anyone. Then we moved onto walking around the front yard, with her continuing to follow directions and return to me whenever I called her back.
Eventually it turned into full-on walks where she had learned to stop still in her tracks whenever headlights appeared down the road. As a result, she got to enjoy really sniffing out the bushes and posts around the neighborhood without any pressure to hurry along. I know it meant a lot to her. Whenever we returned home, she would give me so many kisses and snuggles, as if to say, “Thank you, dear friend.”
I got a bunch of hens. A few of them like to break out of their enclosed space and wander around the yard. Normally, I’m not too upset with it, but we are trying to grow grass and get the garden started, and they don’t really help with either.
But when I see them out the window, I call them out by name and they start walking back towards their enclosure and wait for me to open the gate.
I refuse to believe my chickens have that level of awareness
We have about 35 hens on our farm. Some of them are far more intelligent than others.
There’s also a reason we free-roam our birds. They have cultivated a network with the our two pigs and the resident crows. The chickens will find a spot that might have bugs or something. They will make a fuss and the pigs will come over and dig it up. Then the chickens will pick away at what gets dug up. Then the crows come in after for what’s left.
In return, the crows watch over the chickens in the early mornings and will make a ruckus if there’s a threat nearby, which sends the chickens back into the coop. We will throw out dog kibble for the crows or buy old pumpkins/squash from our local market and toss it outside at 5am for the crows to have their own snack.
All this started because our chickens could manipulate the pigs to come dig up a particular spot they wanted dug up.
They are fascinating if you just get stoned and watch them for a while. Like watching a telenovela about dinosaurs and not understanding a word of Spanish. They’re all so expressive that you really don’t need to know the dialogue, you can just figure it out. They’ve all got personalities and attitudes and a whole social structure.
Friend of mine always said he liked “watching chicken TV”. He retired and #1 was looking forward to doing that all day + scotch.
We have chickens. “Chicken TV” is a real thing. We’ll just hand on the deck and watch the chickens just “chicken” and they’re fascinating to watch.
I love just chilling and watching chickens do their thing. They are a combination of toddlers and dinosaurs lol.
Yours don’t
So true
I often talk to my cat, sometimes in human language sometimes in meows, he usually answers back. In the morning he will usually wake us up when he’s hungry with a series of meows and during the day will meow until I follow him to the kitchen where he will then point out if he wants food or his water changed in the water bowl (he cleans his paws in there).
Cat tax?
(He sounds adorable)Had a very vocal and expressive feist/rat terrier mix once. One day on walkies I definitely heard him singing “signs, signs everywhere signs can’t you smell the signs” another time he came within 1/16" of catching a squirrel. He looked up with sadness after it got away and said “i bet they taste just like chicken nuggets”
PSA please don’t give a dog chicken nuggets, that’s way too much salt for them and they can develop painful kidney issues.
He only managed to steal a couple I never gave them to him
Isn’t there a petswithjobs com or something like that? animalswithjobs?
They have a vocabulary and knowledge of the environment… Just not a large vocab.
You can get talking buttons and train pets to develop a shared kind of understanding of language and express wants/needs.
Here’s a podcast of someone’s experience:
My cat would just be pushing the “I want food” button all day, even though she’s already got food in her bowl.
(But she wants new food!)
The cat might want a specific food from its past.
I believe one cat started pushing “plant cylinder” because they were once fed pumpkin from a can.
My favorite story about this is chimpanzees trying brussel sprouts for the first time and then using pictograms on the wall to refer to the brussel sprouts as “garbage cabbage”.
